Brat's Birthday

Few serial characters of our time have excited such mixed emotions as Fanny Brice's Baby Snooks. Regarded by some as a loathly brat, by others as a most comical moppet, Snooks has been a mainstay of the Maxwell House Good News show since December 1937, currently attracts, with the help of Frank Morgan, the latest thing in Munchausens, an audience estimated at about 15,000,000.

Snooks first came into being at a private party in Manhattan. In the course of singing a patter song, Poor Pauline, Miss Brice lapsed into baby talk. Years later Moss Hart wrote a Snooks skit for Sweet and Low, but Snooks was officially recognized when she was included in the Brice routine for the 1934 Follies. The late Dave Freedman and Phil Rapp, who still writes the Maxwell House script, collaborated on material for Snooks. A couple of years later Fanny ran through the Snooks skit as a guest of Maxwell House. Signed up as a permanent attraction on the program, Miss Brice cooed, gurgled and whined her way to a berth in radio. Now 49, she boasts: "I could do Snooks blind. I don't have to work into it. It's part of me. It's like stealing money to get paid for it."

As Snooks, Fanny goes through all kinds of strange contortions before a mike, mugging, squirming and jumping up & down. Unlike Colleague Morgan she never ad libs, gives Scriptwriter Rapp and Hanley Stafford, her "Daddy," plenty of credit for helping her put Snooks across, threw a party last week in honor of them and Snooks's seventh anniversary. Favorite situation cooked up for Snooks involved the purchase of an Easter bonnet. First she demands flowers for the hat, then fruit, eggs, vegetables. Remarks the clerk: "Shall I wrap it up?" Replies Snooks: "No, I'll eat it here."

For doing Snooks, Fanny is paid $5,000 a week. A bit moody now and restless, she is sometimes difficult to handle, gets whims like refusing to wear glasses for fear of spoiling Snooks's appearance to radio audiences, which necessitates writing her script in triple-size type. A great one for entertaining, she lives in an 18-room Beverly Hills mansion, which she has furnished ornately with French and English antiques. Among recent drop-ins have been the socially hard-to-get Aldous Huxley and Somerset Maugham. Describing the occasion, Fanny remarked, "Like jerks, we played parlor games." Most unusual of her guests is one Roger Davis, who dropped in on her in 1916, has been around ever since. She dotes on her two children (by Nicky Arnstein), is rated a good painter by the Chouinard Art Institute, which she attends. She never discusses past matrimonial ventures if she can help it. When she does, she is a little bitter about her last spouse, whom she refers to scornfully as "That Rose."

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